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Teaching Gardens

Inspired by our botanists, teachers and children’s-literature scholars, a special area of the Saint Michael’s campus is devoted to our Teaching Gardens, which really is a collection of four gardens.

The Arboretum is our term for the impressive variety of trees planted all over campus. Local schools and youth groups take advantage of lessons developed by our Saint Michael’s education and biology students, reviewing signs throughout campus that describe common and scientific names of the trees and other useful information.

Located side-by-side between the college’s main academic building and arts center are three more chief components of the Teaching Gardens: A children’s literature garden called Books in Bloom features plants from favorite story books. Next door, flora native to our region of Vermont can be studied up close in our Native Plants of Vermont garden.

Just a stone’s throw away is an altogether different kind of garden: movable words, artistically etched on pieces of stone scattered upon a bed of pebbles, allow passers-by to create their own poetry in our Word Garden (apparently one of a kind), the newest creation in this charming corner of a beautiful campus.

Hoping to promote learning about plants and their role in children’s literature and the environment, the primary movers for the project, Biology Professor Mark Lubkowitz and Education Professor Valerie Bang-Jensen, imagined and created the gardens in recent years with extensive cooperation from the college’s grounds crew.

These professors and their students are happy to arrange guided field trips of the Gardens or to brainstorm about exciting possible uses that haven’t been tried. It’s what they love to do.